With all of the other noise in Washington around the impeachment inquiry, the Ukraine quid pro quo, the Syrian treason, and the continued dysfunction in the White House, the murder of Syrian politician Hevrin Khalaf appeared and disappeared from the news stream instantly.
One of the bright lights in Syrian politics and society, Hevrin Khalaf was murdered by Turkish allied militias and by their American enabler, President Donald Trump:
On Oct. 12, Hevrin Khalaf, a 35-year-old Kurdish politician, was stopped at a checkpoint outside the town of Tel Abyad in northeastern Syria by Turkey-backed Syrian Arab militias.
Ms. Khalaf, who was the secretary general of the Future Syria Party, played a vital role in fostering Kurdish-Arab friendship and worked for a joint future in a postwar Syria. Turkish-backed militiamen pulled Ms. Khalaf out of her car and struck her head and legs with metal objects. They grabbed her by her hair and dragged her until skin was peeled off her scalp. And then they shot her in the head, according to her autopsy report. The killers were filmed shouting insults while firing.
Ms. Khalaf embodied the kind of society the people in Rojava, the autonomous enclave in northern Syria imagined and fought for since 2012. With all its imperfections, the Kurdish experiment sought to create a society built on gender equality, bottom-up organization, participatory deliberation, ecological principles and peoples’ reconciliation. It is an attempt at self-determination. The Kurds in northern Syria did not seek the establishment of an ethnic nation-state.
But that’s nothing to the agents of the Turkish genocide of ethnic Kurds in Syria:
The next morning, Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, celebrated Ms. Khalaf’s murder as a “successful operation of neutralizing” a political leader affiliated with the “terrorist” People’s Democratic Union, or P.Y.D.
This is murder pure and simple. This is genocide. This is terrorism. And Donald Trump is as culpable as the militia and their supporter, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The United Nations should be bringing war crimes charges against all of them.
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